On Flashing

I avoided Spaceteam originally because people said it was like Artemis, and Artemis is already like Artemis, so I felt like I had that base covered. There is a lot of shit going on over here, a lot of shit to do, and I don’t really have the luxury of doing any of them twice just for kicks.

It’s not actually like Artemis though, in any way, except that they both involve Space, but space is physically and conceptually vast. It can probably contain two games without them ever touching.

I tworted something to the effect that Artemis simulates Star Trek, while Spaceteam simulates Galaxy Quest, that is to say, it’s a parody that just happens to be rendered as a simulation. I said it that way to make people curious, so that they would go get it, because it doesn’t cost any-Goddamn-thing which is nonsense but does streamline the process. But there are other ways to explain it.

It doesn’t actually matter what game I am playing: if it is a multiplayer game, that game is about capital C Communication. For me, anyway. For Kiko, it’s almost certainly about precision head-shooting, a fact which reveals itself in the stats. But I am absolutely driven to communicate, I am a Word Furnace. I’m getting right down to the bedrock here, what our disaffected youth refer to as Real Talk. It’s a compulsion that has basically guided my entire life, all of it, until I was able to find or even create a context where near constant communication was not incredibly rude and is, in fact, required.

And so, for me, a multiplayer game that you mostly play by communicating just fucking twists my head around. Spaceteam is a situation machine that creates an endless sequence of stellar probs, and you and your friends have to fix it, except no one player has access to all of the controls. And the controls are all named nonsense sci-fi bullshit. In the latest update, the patch notes suggest that you could now “Frog Blast The Vent Core,” which seems good. For the vent core, if not the frog. So telling people what to do under time constraints when the names of things are crazy, or are covered with slime, or on a panel that has been dislodged by tachyons, or has been replaced by symbols with no obvious description is the game. And it is awesome. For me, and probably for you

A project manager type like Robert Khoo is a must in these situations. It helps, anyway. Well, I guess it helps sometimes.